Obama policies are destructive

If Kathleen Parker ("Limbaugh is a showman, not a shaman," March 4) had actually been listening to Rush Limbaugh the past few days, she would know that, far from wanting to "slash and burn," he wants America to succeed and prosper.

She would know that Limbaugh wants this country to maintain the free-enterprise capitalist system that has given us the highest standard of living the world has ever seen. Unfortunately, we now have a president who's begun to destroy the very system that made us great and replace it with a socialist agenda that has failed wherever it has been tried. He wants to punish the producers and reward the slackers.

In just six weeks of President Obama, the stock market has plunged and trillions of dollars in wealth have evaporated. Talk about slash and burn! Does Parker really believe that any thinking person wants Obama's destructive policies to succeed?
-- Richard Neubert, Nutley

Tired of paying more
When a household runs low on money, the family cuts back on vacations, eats more mac and cheese and lowers the thermostat. It can't spend money it doesn't have. When a business is short on money, it can try to increase sales, but it also can't buy new equipment, and it freezes hiring or even cuts salaries.

So when New Jersey finds itself short of money after spending like it could print the stuff, what does it do? It puts a gun to citizens' heads and says "Gimme more!"

We have no choice when the governor wants to tax electric utilities even more. The tax bill may go to the utility, but the consumers are going to pay it. Likewise all the other schemes. The state will do anything to avoid spending less, cutting out "Christmas Tree" projects or otherwise ridding itself of the need-to-spend addiction.

I, for one, am more than a little tired of being told I have to pay more for programs someone else comes up with. The governor, Legislature and courts all get to spend my money as they see fit, with little or no recourse.
-- Norman Dotti, Kinnelon

"Inconvenience" charge
I recently received my automobile registration renewal form in the mail.

I was given the option of going to a local NJMVC office and interacting with a clerk, or filling out the paperwork and sending it and a check to Trenton. The second option requires a clerk to open my letter and enter the information into a computer.

My third option was to go online, answer the questions posted and provide payment via a credit card. Using this method, I was interacting with a computer, thus saving the cost of clerks who would be required by either of the first two options. For the ease of using this option, I was charged a $2 "convenience charge." Encouraging the public to use the internet option should save the taxpayers money and reduce the need for many clerks.

As the silly "convenience charge" shows, the state has no interest in saving money. Cutting staff and thus reducing costs is not in the business plan that Trenton has been using for decades.
-- Bob Witt, Tinton Falls

Fiscal conservative failures
Reader Tom Baldino ("End excessive spending," March 3) complains that "Obama has spent more in his first month in office than President George W. Bush did in four years." President Obama's 10-year transparent budget includes costs that Bush never included in his budgets, such as the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were funded "off the books."

Obama is creating sweeping changes because he inherited a huge national debt left to us by Republican presidents who devastated the treasury. When Ronald Reagan came into office, the national debt was $1 trillion. Now it is $11 trillion, and would be even higher but for the budget surplus that President Bill Clinton left.

Reagan's huge $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 produced massive annual budget deficits, and he was responsible for doubling the combined debt of 200 years of U.S. history. George H. W. Bush broke his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge to address the continuing deficits during his administration. His son set about destroying the surplus that Clinton left, with his $1.4 trillion tax cut in 2001, followed by another cut in 2003, as well as the almost $1 trillion war in Iraq.

So much for the myth of fiscal conservatism.
-- Selma Prager, Springfield

Money is misspent
Despite the change of administrations, it is still infuriating to read the news out of Washington.

A few weeks ago, our representatives humiliated executives of the automobile companies who begged for help to stay in business. But these legislators are eager to hand out our hard-earned tax dollars to big banks and big insurance companies without question. What is so sacred about AIG and Citigroup?

The car companies employ hundreds of thousands of American workers. How many employees does AIG have? Where are the details of their plan to spend our money? Citibank gave out a lot of generous bonuses with our money. I am tired of hearing that AIG and Citigroup are "too big to let them go broke." Why isn't General Motors too big to go broke?

The way out of our economic problems is from the bottom up. People would behave like consumers if they had money to spend and feelings of job security. Instead, we get to watch our elected representatives give multibillion dollar subsidies to their buddies in a handful of big corporations.

Perhaps the stock market is reading this situation accurately as it drops like a rock.
-- Gene Steiker, Caldwell

Medical records already shared
I am truly surprised at reader Jeanne Andriuzzi's letter ("Beware of socialization") in your Feb. 28 edition. She urged us to wake up because, she said, the electronic medical records-keeping funded by the Obama stimulus bill is "socialized health care." She warns that a federal bureaucracy will monitor treatments and decide whether they are medically necessary, and not, she says, your doctor.

The reader must be among the few who have not had any dealings with doctors in recent years. Today, our medical care is monitored by for-profit insurance companies. Medical treatment is not decided solely by my doctor -- the insurance company will tell me whether the treatment is appropriate and necessary and whether they will pay for it. They will send me a list of which medications I can take. They can even decide, after the fact, that the emergency room visit was too expensive and refuse to pay for it.

The reader asks, "how long before the best and brightest forego medical school" since medical care will be treated as a "cost problem." Wake up! That happened a while ago -- and it is at the hands of for-profit insurers whose policies and procedures are opaque to the rest of us.
-- Sue Gillespie, Chatham

In favor of producing energy on farms
Your editorial, "Harvesting energy" (March 4), expressed puzzlement over why we and other conservation groups would oppose renewable energy-generation on preserved farmland.

We do support renewable energy-generation on preserved farmland and agree that these uses should be encouraged. Farmland owners should be able to use solar, wind and other renewable energy sources for their own use and sell back limited excess energy to the grid. In fact, they are already allowed to do so without the proposed legislation.

Our concern is that the proposed legislation would go further to allow farmland owners to establish commercial power-generation on preserved farmland. This is the key concern, since all non-agricultural commercial uses were severed from the land when public funds were used to preserve these lands.

Proponents of the legislation say amendments would limit commercial power-generation, but, in fact, the bill as currently written does not appear to effectively limit the expansion of commercial power-generation. We do not believe this is what New Jersey voters approved when they voted to preserve farmland through multiple bond questions over the years. There is still time to fix this proposal, and we urge the legislature to do so.
-- Michele S. Byers. The writer is executive director of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation